Toby was temporarily turned off while Mikey worked on him. He wanted to make sure that everything was right with the AI before putting him in an android body. He was getting pretty excited about the whole thing. The reason that he'd created Toby to begin with was to have a friend in the underground facility before he went crazy from being lonely. Their friendship was kind of limited, though, since he could only interact with his friend in his own apartment. But now Toby would be able to go to the cafeteria with him and the labs and anywhere else that they wanted.

I wonder what Amelia will think of him, Mikey thought. He's not perfect but he's pretty good at using idioms and expressing simulated emotions. I'm lucky to have found that code that simulates emotions for AIs. It wasn't easy to get right.

After a while, Mikey tested the code and everything seemed to be running smoothly. He started Toby back up who was grateful for the adjustments.

"I'm just gonna take a nap for an hour or two," Mikey said. "I feel like I didn't get enough sleep last night."

"Okay, but don't be gone too long," Toby said. "I get bored easily."

"Fair enough."

Mikey shuffled to his room and took off his jeans before getting under the covers. He closed his eyes but couldn't fall asleep right away. His mind was wandering towards Amelia once again. He thought about their time in Aperture and what he'd said while there.

I really should've made a point to be more personal with her, he thought. It's not exactly like we're strangers to each other.

Even after their falling-out as kids, Amelia had started talking to him a little more in high school. After they had both reached adulthood, Amelia actually asked if he'd wanted to hang out. Mikey could still feel the elation as he remembered when she'd asked him to hang out. He'd gotten all flustered and tidied everything in his apartment in anticipation of her arrival.

He had been stressing over thinking of an activity for them to do that couldn't be construed as being romantic. He'd just wanted a nice, platonic thing to do with her as friends. That's all he'd really wanted. He'd told himself that he didn't need to be her boyfriend. He'd mostly just wanted to be talking to her again.

When she had arrived, he had welcomed her inside and led her to his small dining table. He'd asked if he could get her anything to drink and she'd settled on a glass of apple juice. His hands had been shaking as he'd poured the juice into the glass, almost spilling it on his counter.

After bringing the juice over, he'd sat across from her at the table. He'd set out boxes on the table that were only a few inches in height. Amelia had been eyeing them curiously before he'd sat down across from her.

"Okay, so, um, I-I thought of something fun we could do," Mikey had stammered. "There's this really neat trading card game that's kinda old. Like, from the early 90s."

He opened one of the long boxes and revealed a collection of trading cards. They were neatly sorted into different types by slips of paper between random cards.

"These are my white cards," Mikey said. "There are five colors for five different ways to play. White is for healing, green is for boosting your creatures, blue is more for controlling your opponent, red is for burning through your opponent's life quickly, and black is used for hurting your opponent as much as possible—even if it means you need to sacrifice one of your own creatures and pay some health to do so. I think you'd like white but you can choose whatever color you want. Oh, and there are colorless cards that are mostly artifacts that help you in all sorts of ways."

Amelia had stared at him blankly for a few moments before asking, "So is this like Pokémon or something?"

"Uh, I-I don't know," Mikey had said nervously. "I never actually learned how to play the card game."

"To be honest, neither did I," Amelia had admitted with a sheepish smile. Mikey had smiled back.

He'd shown her how the game worked and how to build a deck. He'd worked with her to construct a white deck that created human tokens for fighting and angels with the evasive ability "flying".

As Amelia had gotten the hang of it, Mikey started to go easy on her less. He'd started to get a little competitive, and he still felt that that was why they had started to hang out less until they were no longer talking anymore. He'd gone back to being mopey and staring at her from far away.

I'm not gonna let that happen again, he vowed as he slowly started to drift to sleep. I swear if I can get her to hang out with me again, I'll let her choose the activity.